Zebras beat out SCOTUS on ABC News

4/3/14 1:46 PM EDT

The evening newscasts are always a race against time, just 30 minutes to capture the biggest stories of the day while also capturing the viewer's attention. But when a landmark ruling came down from the Supreme Court on Wednesday, striking down cumulative caps on individual political donations, ABC News did not even give it a passing mention in its Wednesday night broadcast of "World News with Diane Sawyer."

While all three networks led with the breaking news of a shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, NBC and CBS also did full segments about the ruling with some of their top correspondents: NBC's Pete Williams and CBS's Jan Crawford and Bob Schieffer.

An ABC News spokesperson said that the prepared segment on the ruling was cut in order to focus on the breaking news out of Fort Hood, which they returned to at the end of the broadcast, unlike the other networks. While that is a completely understandable trade-off, the broadcast still had time to do stories about a new study on why zebras have stripes, Kraft's Philadelphia Cream Cheese changing its formula, and the Milwaukee Brewers adopting a stray dog and making it their unofficial mascot. The spokesperson said the decision was made "on the fly" because of the breaking news and said that, along with coverage on ABC News's website, correspondent Brian Ross will do a full piece on the ruling for Thursday's show.

Update 4:30p.m.:

ABC spokespeople say that ABC spent longer than NBC or CBS covering the Fort Hood shooting on Wednesday night, five minutes in total compared to NBC's one minute, 23 seconds and CBS's two minutes, 48 seconds.